After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand • Hacker News Board

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#201

Post by kaydub » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

skerit wrote: post #55

simonw wrote: post #9

> Not only does an agent not have the ability to evolve a specification over a multi-week period as it builds out its lower components, it also makes decisions upfront that it later doesn’t deviate from. That's your job. The great thing about coding agents is that you can tell them "change of design: all API interactions need to go through a new single class that does authentication and retries and rate-limit throttl…

The article said: > So I’m back to writing by hand for most things. Amazingly, I’m faster, more accurate, more creative, more productive, and more efficient than AI, when you price everything in, and not just code tokens per hour At least he said "most things". I also did "most things" by hand, until Opus 4.5 came out. Now it's doing things in hours I would have worked an entire week on. But it's not a prompt-and-for…

The article and video just feels like another dev poo-pooing LLMs.

"vibe coding" didn't really become real until 2025, so how were they vibe coding for 2 years? 2 years ago I couldn't count on an llm to output JSON consistently.

Overall the article/video are SUPER ambiguous and frankly worthless.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#202

Post by brightball » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

acessoproibido wrote: post #170

recursivedoubts wrote: post #8

AI is incredibly dangerous because it can do the simple things very well, which prevents new programmers from learning the simple things ("Oh, I'll just have AI generate it") which then prevents them from learning the middlin' and harder and meta things at a visceral level. I'm a CS teacher, so this is where I see a huge danger right now and I'm explicit with my students about it: you HAVE to write the code. You CAN'…

I'm not so sure. I spent A LOT of time writing sorting algo code by hand in university. I spent so much time writing assembly code by hand. So much more time writing instructions for MIPS by hand. (To be fair I did study EE not CS) I learned more about programming in a weekend badly copying hack modules for Minecraft than I learned in 5+ years in university. All that stuff I did by hand back then I haven't used it a…

I would interpret his take a little bit differently.

You write sorting algorithms in college to understand how they work. Understand why they are faster because it teaches you a mental model for data traversal strategies. In the real world, you will use pre-written versions of those algorithms in any language but you understand them enough to know what to select in a given situation based on the type of data. This especially comes into play when creating indexes for databases.

What I take the OPs statement to mean are around "meta" items revolved more around learning abstractions. You write certain patterns by hand enough times, you will see the overlap and opportunity to refactor or create an abstraction that can be used more effectively in your codebase.

If you vibe code all of that stuff, you don't feel the repetition as much. You don't work through the abstractions and object relationships yourself to see the opportunity to understand why and how it could be improved.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#203

Post by tudelo » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

pmarreck wrote: post #152

recursivedoubts wrote: post #8

AI is incredibly dangerous because it can do the simple things very well, which prevents new programmers from learning the simple things ("Oh, I'll just have AI generate it") which then prevents them from learning the middlin' and harder and meta things at a visceral level. I'm a CS teacher, so this is where I see a huge danger right now and I'm explicit with my students about it: you HAVE to write the code. You CAN'…

I haven't done long division in decades, am probably unable to do it anymore, and yet it has never held me back in any tangible fashion (and won't unless computers and calculators stop existing)

I am rather positive that if you were sat down in a room and couldn't leave unless you did some mildly complicated long division, you would succeed. Just because it isn't a natural thing anymore and you have not done the drills in decades doesn't mean the knowledge is completely lost.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#204

Post by ray_v » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

recursivedoubts wrote: post #8

AI is incredibly dangerous because it can do the simple things very well, which prevents new programmers from learning the simple things ("Oh, I'll just have AI generate it") which then prevents them from learning the middlin' and harder and meta things at a visceral level. I'm a CS teacher, so this is where I see a huge danger right now and I'm explicit with my students about it: you HAVE to write the code. You CAN'…

Lots of interesting ways to spin this. I was in a computer science course in the late 90s and we were not allowed to use the C++ standard library because it made you a "lazy programmer" according to the instructor. I'm not sure if I agree with that, but the way that I look at it is that computer science all about abstraction, and it seems to me that AI, generative pair programming, vibe coding or what ever you want to call it is just another level of abstraction. I think what is probably more important is to learn what are and are not good programming and project structures and use AI to abstract the boilerplate,. scaffolding, etc so that you can avoid foot guns early on in your development cycle.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#205

Post by Archer6621 » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

pmarreck wrote: post #152

recursivedoubts wrote: post #8

AI is incredibly dangerous because it can do the simple things very well, which prevents new programmers from learning the simple things ("Oh, I'll just have AI generate it") which then prevents them from learning the middlin' and harder and meta things at a visceral level. I'm a CS teacher, so this is where I see a huge danger right now and I'm explicit with my students about it: you HAVE to write the code. You CAN'…

I haven't done long division in decades, am probably unable to do it anymore, and yet it has never held me back in any tangible fashion (and won't unless computers and calculators stop existing)

That makes sense. Some skills just have more utility than others. There are skills that are universally relevant (e.g. general problem solving), and then there are skills that are only relevant in a specific time period or a specific context.

With how rapidly the world has been changing lately, it has become difficult to estimate which of those more specific skills will remain relevant for how long.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#206

Post by drowntoge » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

I always scaffold for AI. I write the stub classes and interfaces and mock the relations between them by hand, and then ask the agent to fill in the logic. I know that in many cases, AI might come up with a demonstrably “better” architecture than me, but the best architecture is the one that I’m comfortable with, so it’s worse even if it’s better. I need to be able to find the piece of code I’m looking for intuitively and with relative ease. The agent can go as crazy as it likes inside a single, isolated function, but I’m always paranoid about “going too far” and losing control of any flows that span multiple points in the codebase. I often discard code that is perfectly working just because it feels unwieldy and redo it.

I’m not sure if this counts as “vibe coding” per se, but I like that this mentality keeps my workday somewhat similar to how it was for decades. Finding/creating holes that the agent can fill with minimal adult supervision is a completely new routine throughout my day, but I think obsessing over maintainability will pay off, like it always has.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#207

Post by kaydub » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

ap99 wrote: post #16

simonw wrote: post #9

> Not only does an agent not have the ability to evolve a specification over a multi-week period as it builds out its lower components, it also makes decisions upfront that it later doesn’t deviate from. That's your job. The great thing about coding agents is that you can tell them "change of design: all API interactions need to go through a new single class that does authentication and retries and rate-limit throttl…

> That's your job. Exactly. AI assisted development isn't all or nothing. We as a group and as individuals need to figure out the right blend of AI and human.

I'm only writing 5-10% of my own code at this point. The AI tools are good, it just seems like people that don't like them expect them to be 100% automatic with no hand holding.

Like people in here complaining about how poor the tests are... but did they start another agent to review the tests? Did they take that and iterate on the tests with multiple agents?

I can attest that the first pass of testing can often be shit. That's why you iterate.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#208

Post by AstroBen » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

WorldMaker wrote: post #190

asadjb wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I have started to feel that using AI to code - even with a well designed spec, ends up with code that; in the authors words, looks like > [Agents write] units of changes that look good in isolation. I have only been using agents for coding end-to-end for a few months now, but I think I've started to realise why the output doesn't feel that great to me. Like you said; "it's my job" to create a well desig…

The old classic mantra is "work smarter, not harder". LLMs are perfect for "work harder". They can produce bulk numbers of lines. They can help you brute force a problem space with more lines of code. We expect the spec writing and prompt management to cover the "work smarter" bases, but part of the work smarter "loop" is hitting those points where "work harder" is about to happen, where you know you could solve a pr…

The used to be a saying of "the best programmers are lazy" - I think the opposite is now true

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#209

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

robmccoll wrote: post #103

recursivedoubts wrote: post #8

AI is incredibly dangerous because it can do the simple things very well, which prevents new programmers from learning the simple things ("Oh, I'll just have AI generate it") which then prevents them from learning the middlin' and harder and meta things at a visceral level. I'm a CS teacher, so this is where I see a huge danger right now and I'm explicit with my students about it: you HAVE to write the code. You CAN'…

Yes! You are best served by learning what a tool is doing for you by doing it yourself or carefully studying what it uses and obfuscates from you before using the tool. You don't need to construct an entire functioning processor in an HDL, but understanding the basics of digital logic and computer architecture matters if you're EE/CompE. You don't have to write an OS in asm, but understanding assembly and how it gets…

[deleted]

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#210

Post by boilerupnc » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

orev wrote: post #27

recursivedoubts wrote: post #8

AI is incredibly dangerous because it can do the simple things very well, which prevents new programmers from learning the simple things ("Oh, I'll just have AI generate it") which then prevents them from learning the middlin' and harder and meta things at a visceral level. I'm a CS teacher, so this is where I see a huge danger right now and I'm explicit with my students about it: you HAVE to write the code. You CAN'…

It’s like weightlifting: sure you can use a forklift to do it, but if the goal is to build up your own strength, using the forklift isn’t going to get you there. This is the ultimate problem with AI in academia. We all inherently know that “no pain no gain” is true for physical tasks, but the same is true for learning. Struggling through the new concepts is essentially the point of it, not just the end result. Of cou…

I feel like the aviation pilot angst captured by "automation dependency" and the fears around skills loss is another great analogy. [0]

[0] https://eazypilot.com/blog/automation-dependency-blessing-or...